Troubled families have too many children ?

[BridgetJonesPants]

AIBU to agree with this article written by Louise Casey, the Prime Minister's troubled families tsar?

uk.news.yahoo.com/troubled-families-too-many-children-022219547.html

Although I have no idea how you can get 'these mothers' who have probably had a chaotic upbringing themselves to take responsibility for not having any more children.

According to Wikipedia it goes something like this:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

That was to Lesley.

And it's to do with the rise to power of the Nazis.

i don't think it compares. The nazis were murdering people. The Jews had no rights. As Birds has said things aren't working with the families and there needs to be some changes.

throwing money at people doesn't always work. some of the 'problem families' aren't necessarily poor materially, it is often a mentality.

I remember one lad telling me he got £5 a day pocket money to spend on what he liked. Another girl's dad smashed a door in their house.

oh no that's awful I said having to find money to replace that.

oh well we'll just go and get another one, have done so before was her response.

this girl used to contradict the teaching in the health and social classes about poverty of being on benefits as it wasn't her experience

Let's keep the Nazis out of this! The poem was used to illustrate LesleyPumpshaft's point that we have to do something about the situation and can't just sit idly by - but she might not have known about the Nazi connotation. Nor did I. It's been used in other contexts too.

but that's the point. no one has been sitting by. The families have had support. Who is sitting idley by.

Plus to an extent you reap what you sow in life.

Actually, I think Lesley's comments about scapegoating are very relevant and should be listened to. There have been a few reports out showing that attacks (verbal and physical) on people with disabilities have increased significantly since the coalition have been in power.

Perhaps more relevant than the poem is Allport's scale of prejudice.

Very chilling, Dahlen.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allport's_Scale

alemci I didn't believe it either until I did a miracle weight loss story on someone who'd been a shade under 30st and lost roughly half of it through a liquid-only diet under medical supervision because her weight was killing her.

She previously lived on takeaway Pizza Hut. So she didn't need crockery, cutlery, a fridge, fuel for cooking or even tea towels and washing up liquids. Virtually everyone on the estate was like that.

Her doctor had authorised her to eat solids again and given her a food list to follow and that's where she came unstuck because she had nothing to cook with and the initial outlay before foodstuffs swallowed up her benefits.

Shops that sold decent frozen food and staples such as rice were a 30 minute bus ride away. Pizza Hut and various takeaways were a 5 minute waddle - and I'm not being rude when I say waddle. She physically couldn't cope with anything more. So she couldn't get a job before. When I met her she had just got a job on the door of a nightclub. She was quite formidable at 15 st but seemed like she'd be better than male bouncers at calming and jollying along drunks.

She was a nice person and more than willing to try and change - losing weight was an incredible challenge that she rose to. I'm not sure I could live on bland shakes for a year without breaking and eating McDonalds. She just needed more help to set herself straight but it wasn't available. She's probably 30 st again and is costing the NHS loads. Her 3 kids weren't really fat then but I bet they are now.

titty I agree, it is shitty housekeeping and a chaotic lifestyle, but what's the point of sneering at these people especially when they show a real will to change? Why not help?

Even Louise Casey is talking about spending a lot of money to help these people change. I don't think her sums and the logistics remotely add up but at least she's paying lip service to spending money.

interesting limited thanks. still cannot really understand how it gets like that in the first place. wouldn't you kit yourself out a bit if you moved into a new house/flat. even if you went to poundland and got a taxi rather than continually buying takeaway which must work out more expensive in the long run.

maybe people from social services need to provide transport and make their clients shop properly.

must go for generations. presumably her parents were no help.

at least she tried to help herself.

She was earning a wage from her door-work supplemented by various benefits. I'm not sure what she would have qualified for but someone like her needed to be encouraged and she can't be the only one like that.

Yes, it shocked me how she ended up like that. She had some very odd views on contraception and morality too.

She believed that trying to avoid pregnancy made you a bad woman because that meant you planned to have sex rather than it just happening to you. By her logic she was taking the consequences of sex by risking pregnancy every time. She thought she was more moral than me on the pill but she was too polite to say it out loud.

Weird but that was how she'd been brought up.

She couldn't take the pill even after her weight loss because she was still too heavy. She couldn't use the cap because she was explaining that you get a 'shelf' of fat in your vagina that makes it ping out when you are grossly obese. And the sizing isn't reliable when you are steadily losing weight. Don't know about a coil. I doubt she could have persuaded a boyfriend to use a condom but she was single when we met so pregnancy wasn't an immediate problem.

There was quite a lot to think about that I'd never imagined.

But you have to put the effort into finding those opportunities, and if you're already putting the effort into finding solutions for another 50 'impossible' problems, where is that time and effort going to come from? @ Dahlen

You're absolutely right. I've just started doing some work for the CAB - mainly tracking down the right people to contact in the maze of Authority and writing letters for people and sometimes phone calls if a body is particularly recalcitrant.

It's my job - I'm a journalist Aka Professional Pain In The Arse .

Even with the research skills and persistence I have it's often infuriating and sometimes exhausting. I don't understand how anyone depressed, tired, without a thick skin, an I Know My Rights manner and the will to be as stubborn as a mule with lazy, judgmental bureaucrats gets anywhere.

It's one of the best things I've ever done.

her morality sounds very strange. was she a lapsed catholic with every sperm being sacred.

coil thing very interesting but maybe too much info yuck :)

Not sure. It was skewed fatalism. Which, thinking about it, is Catholicism. I am one, so that makes it okay to say that.

At the risk of giving people something else to get vexed about, she was looking forward to an apronectomy to have her excess abdominal skin cut off if she kept the weight off long-term.

She showed me it. Apronectomy is well-named; the flap reached mid-thigh so you couldn't see her fanny even if she'd have been able to comfortably wear knickers.

It wasn't so she could look good in a bikini. It was to eliminate the vicious chemical burns caused by the constant sweat trapped in the skin folds.

One of the many things that motivated her to lose weight was the humiliation of asking her eldest son to wipe her arse for her because her arms weren't long enough to reach.

I'm not asking anyone to feel sorry for these people but just to understand that they are not living the life of Riley.

I certainly agree with that poem as I often quote it but here I would say by doing nothing about these problem families, rather than intervening as the Govermnent suggests then and only then would we be like those standing by allowing a wrong to occur. The proposed intervention is the moral good.

Also people are much happier if they have work whether paid or unpaid and the sense of well being that comes from self reliance and supporting your own family is something I hope we can achieve for everyone in the UK.

I would NOT 'feel better' by being forced to work for nothing for a large company, to increase their profits.

A) if the job is there to be done, pay at least NMW for it.

B) If I was forced to work for more than 16 hours a week, it would not make me 'feel better', it would put too much physical strain on my body, and my Fibro would be worse, and it would make me have more seizures. How would that make me 'feel better'?

What a load of guff, yet again, from Xenia, who seems unable to see that being exploited by large companies (or even small ones), in order to increase their profits, while at the same time living a subsistence level life, is going to make the poor feel worse, not better. All it is going to do is make more people disenfranchised, and opting out of Society, and living outside its rules too, making their living on the black market rather than claiming benefits.

And this IS starting to happen.

If there is a job to be done people should be paid the market rate for doing it.

If they don't get paid, as is happening under the govt's Work Programme, tax receipts go down, the country continues to pay them benefits and the only people who benefit are the employers taking advantage of free labour and the govt who get to see the unemployment figures fall artificially.

The figure of 120,000 "problem families" was taken from a study done in 2004 which determined that there were 117,000 poor families. None of the criteria included criminal behaviour. They were: earning a low income; nobody in the family working; poor housing; parents with no qualifications; the mother having a mental health problem; one parent with a longstanding illness or disability; and the family unable to afford basics including food and clothes. So to talk of these families as "families from hell" as the Prime Minister has done, is to define poverty as criminal. Genuinely criminal families are less likely to be poor, presumably, as they have ways of getting income illegally. Demonising the poor is just another way for this government to avoid helping those who really need it, just as they have done to the disabled.

My parents had 12 children and we were brought up on my dad's wage.

I have to laugh at the govt poring taxpayer's money to these folk.

My sons attended free tennis lessons in a deprived area, non of the local children turned up!

That is not going to stop the deprivation cycle. Education, parenting skills, stop benefits, let them pay for childbirth, sterilisation - get real, otherwise keeping chasing your tails... it's going to be a hard slog...

Hi Xenia

Are you on the site PN?

The phenomenon of "costs more to be poor than rich" is nothing new - it's always been the case since the rise of urbanisation and the industrial revolution.

The need to buy in services instead of being self-sufficient, ie the urban poor living on takeaway food because they have no little patch of land to grow food or keep animals on , nowhere to forage and no hearth to cook on. And no access to free fuel, so you go to the pub or to work to keep warm in the evening. Having to pay a fortune for water. Nowhere to make cloth, (every woman was a "spinster" in a rural economy) so you had to buy clothes. Loan sharks, the ever-present terror of the debt-collector, just read Dickens FFS. All those moral panics about the "undeserving poor".

We call them "underclass" nowadays.

'Genuinely criminal families are less likely to be poor, presumably, as they have ways of getting income illegally.'

Excellent point by ebsin. That sums it up.

"The figure of 120,000 "problem families" was taken from a study done in 2004 which determined that there were 117,000 poor families. None of the criteria included criminal behaviour."

My god, Edam, really???

It gets more Through The Looking Glass every day.